Investigate

2 June 2014

Ian Wishart

‘Air Con’ and ‘Totalitaria’ author Ian Wishart debates Green party co-leader Russel Norman on climate change

[Russel Norman’s comments extracted from Green Party climate speech, 1 June 2014]

NORMAN: I’d like to briefly touch on some of the latest climate impacts around the world.
Because I know how easy it is to lose track. The effects of a warming planet can begin, after a while, to seem like a bizarre sci-fi film playing on repeat in the background of daily life.
The sheer scale and cost of what’s occurring is difficult to comprehend. From the tropics to the poles, from the mountains to the sea, from the poorest countries to the richest, climate change is tightening its grip.

The last few years are perhaps best summarised as a series of “is this really happening” moments. Antarctic ice loss being one such moment. We recently learnt that parts of the ice sheet have begun an irreversible slide into the sea. 160 billion tonnes of ice is being lost every year – twice as much as when the Continent was last surveyed. Antarctica is literally shedding ice.

The resulting sea level rise doesn’t bear thinking about.

The impact on coastal communities, of which New Zealand has many, is likely to be catastrophic.

WISHART: Russel, you are trying to induce newspaper, radio and TV journalists to make fools of themselves in the eyes of their educated readers/viewers, because the latter group know the science and they facepalm every time a gullible journalist falls for rhetoric over facts. Why don’t we read the peer reviewed science together. Here’s what climate scientists have discovered about West Antarctic ice melt:[1]

“The record shows that this region has warmed since the late 1950s, at a similar magnitude to that observed in the Antarctic Peninsula and central West Antarctica; however, this warming trend is not unique. More dramatic isotopic warming (and cooling) trends occurred in the mid-nineteenth and eighteenth centuries, suggesting that at present, the effect of anthropogenic climate drivers at this location has not exceeded the natural range of climate variability in the context of the past ~300 years.”

Key phrases? How about “this warming trend is not unique” and the effect of human CO2 emissions has “not exceeded the natural range of climate variability”? Those two points demonstrate to any journalist or objective observer that there is nothing, absolutely nothing, special or unprecedented about Antarctic melt to date.

That finding is backed up by yet another this year, which reports warming cycles in Antarctica like the current one have occurred five times in the past 350 years alone:

“The data suggest that during the past 350 years such events have taken place at least five times.”[2]

What part of ‘irreversible’ do the Greens fail to understand? It has warmed and cooled again at least five times recently, none of which had anything to do with CO2.

Perhaps the Green Party’s ‘science advisors’ have not told you Russel, but I will: the part of Antarctica losing the most glacial ice of all – in fact it is the biggest single contributor to sea level increase in the world – is the Pine Island Glacier. It’s a monster throwing massive amounts of ice into the ocean. But guess what, it has nothing to do with CO2 and much more to do with an erupting volcanic chain underneath it:

“A very basic condition – how hot is it under the glaciers – has changed with this finding,” says Sridhar Anandakrishnan, a glaciologist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park. “Anyone who wants to model the ice flow of West Antarctica in future must take this into account.”[3]

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist (or maybe it does) to figure out that if you have one of Antarctica’s biggest volcanoes sitting under the fastest-moving glacier, the two events ‘may’ be linked.

A further clue to this is that scientists know that whatever triggered Pine Island Glacier’s race for the sea, it happened during a time of global cooling more than 40 years ago, long before greenhouse gases were an issue, and it was big enough to unhook the glacier from a ridge holding it in place:

“We do not know what kick-started the initial retreat from the ridge, but we do know that it started some time prior to 1970.”[4]

To reiterate Russel, the UN IPCC says it can only find human impact traces on the climate post 1970. Nothing we did was big enough to dislodge Pine Island glacier prior to that. Whatever is causing that glacial melt, it was natural, not human caused.

Which is pretty much what honest ice researchers will concede, if you actually ask them:

“I have a problem with the widespread implication (in the popular press) that the West Antarctic collapse can be attributed to anthropogenic climate change,” said Mike Wolovik, a graduate researcher at Lamont-Doherty who studies ice sheet dynamics. “The marine ice sheet instability is an inherent part of ice sheet dynamics that doesn’t require any human forcing to operate. When the papers say that collapse is underway, and likely to last for several hundred years, that’s a reasonable and plausible conclusion.” But, he said, the link between CO2 levels and the loss of ice in West Antarctica “is pretty tenuous.”[5]

But don’t you worry Russel, my friends in the media will probably believe you regardless, and not ask any hard questions.

You seem to be basing your predictions on a couple of alarmist papers published last month, but the UN IPCC in its latest AR5 report actually says the Antarctic appears to be reducing sea level increase rather than causing it:

“Taking all these considerations together, we have medium confidence in model projections of a future Antarctic SMB (surface mass balance) increase, implying a negative contribution to GMSL rise (see also Sections 13.4.4.1, 13.5.3 and 14.8.15).”

Then there’s your assertion about 160 billion tonnes of ice loss from Antarctica each year and that this is much higher than usual. Let’s look at that shall we. AR5 is highly sceptical (low confidence) of your claim:

“There is low confidence that the rate of Antarctic ice loss has increased over the last two decades (Chen et al., 2009; Velicogna, 2009; Rignot et al., 2011c; Shepherd et al., 2012); (4.4.2.3)”

“As with Antarctic sea ice, changes in Antarctic ice sheets have complex causes (Section 4.4.3). The observational record of Antarctic mass loss is short and the internal variability of the ice sheet is poorly understood. Due to a low level of scientific understanding there is low confidence in attributing the causes of the observed loss of mass from the Antarctic ice sheet since 1993. Possible future instabilities in the west Antarctic ice sheet cannot be ruled out, but projection of future climate changes over West Antarctica remains subject to considerable uncertainty (Steig and Orsi, 2013).” (10.5.2.1)

Again, Russel, you might be able to convince Lucy Lawless and a couple of gullible reporters, but the sorry truth is that even the UN IPCC is not making the wild claims you have in your Climate Change policy speech.

In fact, unlike you, the IPCC is not even prepared to attribute any Antarctic ice loss to human-caused climate change:

“Due to a low level of scientific understanding there is low confidence in attributing the causes of the observed loss of mass from the Antarctic ice sheet over the past two decades. {4.3, 10.5}”

As for the 160 billion tonnes figure, that’s a guesstimate based on Europe’s Cryosat overflights and which was misreported by the BBC and the American media. Other studies are showing big gains overall for Antarctica and a negative impact on sea level increase:

“The gain of almost 350 Gt (gigatons or billions of tons) from 2009 to 2011 is equivalent to a decrease in global mean sea level at a rate of 0.32 mm/yr over this three-year period.”[6]

You invite the media and the public to be scared about the resulting sea level rise, but that raises another reality check – if rising CO2 levels were genuinely causing ice to melt irreversibly around the world, sea level would be going up rapidly. Bad news for your argument – it ain’t:

“We use 1277 tide gauge records since 1807 to provide an improved global sea level reconstruction and analyse the evolution of sea level trend and acceleration.”

“The new reconstruction suggests a linear trend of 1.9 ± 0.3 mm·yr- 1 during the 20th century, with 1.8 ± 0.5 mm·yr- 1 since 1970.”[7]

In other words, sea level increase rates have not really changed over the past 100 years, no matter how many breathless reports on the TV news try and tell us otherwise.

Your 160 billion ton figures came from media mis-reporting of a couple of recent studies, which noted that Antarctica’s contribution to sea level increase had doubled from 0.19mm a year to 0.45mm a year. If that melt rate is correct, and it doubles again to 0.9mm a year, that’s a massive sea level rise of oh, I don’t know, nine centimetres over a century. In a world where tides rise and fall by six metres or more twice daily in many areas, I challenge you to pinpoint a 9cm rise in sea level.

I blame Suzanne Goldenberg in the Guardian for the outrageous hype that you repeated in your climate policy speech, and even Andy Revkin from the New York Times has called her out on it:

Andy Revkin        ✔ @Revkin

Follow

Awful misuse of “Collapse” in headlines on centuries-long ice loss in W. Antarctica. See rates in papers. Same as ’09 http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/18/study-west-antarctic-melt-a-slow-affair/ …

5:54 AM – 13 May 2014 Manhattan, NY, United States

Study: West Antarctic Melt a Slow Affair

A new simulation of Antarctica’s most vulnerable ice sheets shows few signs of abrupt melting and sea rise.

NYT DotEarth @dotearth

In summary on Antarctic ice loss then, you’ve repeated exaggerations not backed up by peer reviewed science. Hardly a good start for a climate policy speech.

NORMAN: Then there are the floods, the wildfires, the super typhoons, the droughts and the crop failures – again, the likes of which we have not experienced in human history.

US Secretary of State John Kerry had a point when he described climate change as the “world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction”.[i]

WISHART:  I’m so glad you raised this Russel, because once again it looks like the Green Party has got its scientific facts wrong. When I see you referencing John Kerry rather than peer reviewed science, that might explain it. No doubt you’ll quote Al Gore at some point as well.

I would have thought you of all people would have referred to the UN IPCC report before turning your climate policy gun on your own foot, because the IPCC has found no connection between ‘floods…wildfires…super typhoons…and droughts’ that you claim:

“Current datasets indicate no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency over the past century … No robust trends in annual numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes and major hurricanes counts have been identified over the past 100 years in the North Atlantic basin”

“In summary, there continues to be a lack of evidence and thus low confidence regarding the sign of trend in the magnitude and/or frequency of floods on a global scale”

“In summary, there is low confidence in observed trends in small-scale severe weather phenomena such as hail and thunderstorms because of historical data inhomogeneities and inadequacies in monitoring systems”

“In summary, the current assessment concludes that there is not enough evidence at present to suggest more than low confidence in a global-scale observed trend in drought or dryness (lack of rainfall) since the middle of the 20th century due to lack of direct observations, geographical inconsistencies in the trends, and dependencies of inferred trends on the index choice. Based on updated studies, AR4 conclusions regarding global increasing trends in drought since the 1970s were probably overstated. However, it is likely that the frequency and intensity of drought has increased in the Mediterranean and West Africa and decreased in central North America and north-west Australia since 1950”

“In summary, confidence in large scale changes in the intensity of extreme extratropical cyclones since 1900 is low”

If the most recent IPCC report[8] is dropping the “extreme weather” claims as fast as it possibly can, why on earth are you still pitching this rubbish to the public and my fellow journalists?

NORMAN:  In the midst of all this, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has released three ground-breaking new reports.

Let me summarise them for you in three points:

1) Things are worse than previously thought. The world is at risk of genuine catastrophe.

2) New Zealand is already being affected by extreme weather from climate change, and worse is to come, with serious risks to our agriculture, tourism, coastal settlements and native species.

3) Avoiding climate catastrophe remains doable and eminently affordable, as long as all countries begin the transition to a carbon efficient economy with some urgency.

Already in New Zealand, climate change is not coming cheap. Insurance companies paid out $174 million in costs for weather-related events last year. Drought in New Zealand during the first five months of last year cost the economy $1.6 billion.

At Fox Glacier, jobs are being lost along with the ice. You can no longer walk up the valley and climb the glacier face due to its retreat. The only way to reach it is by helicopter. Thirty people have lost their jobs as a result.[iii]

WISHART: As you have now learned, Russel, the AR5 report found no evidence linking so-called ‘extreme weather’ to CO2 emissions globally, so trying to sneak New Zealand in on that basis is ridiculous. I know there are some silly NZ scientists trying to argue the link, but they have no hard evidence to base it on.

Fox Glacier, incidentally, advances and retreats on a regular basis. Overall, its gradual retreat is linked to the end of the Little Ice Age in the mid 1800s. The world has warmed since then naturally and glaciers worldwide have generally been in retreat from their LIA maximum positions.

As for worse than ever, you would be referring to AR5 forecasts based on the computer modelling they relied on. Sadly AR5 credibility on its computer modelling was trashed in peer-review even before AR5 was published, as the statistical analysis the IPCC used for modelling was more than a decade out of date.

Additionally, the IPCC’s whizz-bang computers stunningly failed to predict the statistically significant 17 year pause in global warming (did you know that most teenagers have never experienced “global warming”, and that in fact temperatures have been on a cooling trend since 2003?). I raised these problems in my new book “Totalitaria”. You should read it, you might get some tips.

In case you are tempted to try and bluff your way out of the “pause” issue by calling me a denier, here’s a peer reviewed quote from the journal Nature that confirms it:

“Despite the continued increase in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, the annual-mean global temperature has not risen in the twenty-first century, challenging the prevailing view that anthropogenic forcing causes climate warming.”[9]

What little global warming we have seen now appears – according to the latest peer reviewed science – to be mostly natural in origin, a result of multi-decadal and centurial heat circulation cycles in the oceans.

Each northern hemisphere winter since 2009 has been bitterly cold, and researchers have been struggling to understand why temperatures have failed to rise in line with global warming predictions and continuing growth in CO2 emissions.

Now, we have an explanation.

New research from respected climate scientist Mojib Latif and others shows the big warming periods like the late 1970s through the nineties, previously thought by climate scientists to have been caused by CO2, were in fact most likely caused by natural cycles in the oceans, or what Latif calls “climate shifts”.

This is particularly important, because the last IPCC report in 2007 said it could only detect a possible “human signature” in climate change since the 1970s. That claim was based on the assumption CO2 was the primary driver. The latest research shows CO2 had little if anything to do with warming since that time. Ergo, the “human signature” detected by the IPCC scientists does not appear to exist.

“These shifts…have a profound effect on the average global surface air temperature of the Earth,” Latif says in a news release on his study. Changes in oceanic patterns turn “the world’s climate topsy-turvy and are clearly reflected in the average temperature of the Earth.”[10]

This horrific little discovery implies that any warmer Antarctic oceans or air temperatures that you say underpin your climate policy are caused by natural forces, not humans; if parts of Antarctica are melting for non-volcanic reasons, those reasons nonetheless have nothing to do with people driving SUVs or cattle belching.

There has been no continuation of warming since 1997, making this the 17^th year of a pause as I said. When Al Gore took NZ’s gullible politicians for a ride with his movie, temperatures had not only flatlined, they were four years into a cooling cycle.

Nonetheless, based on out of date computer models, climate scientists kept on giving journalists sillier and sillier climate projections.

In fact, the [IPCC] computer projections ran four times hotter for the period than the actual real observed temperature readings, as a just published report in the journal Nature Climate Change notes:

“The inconsistency between observed and simulated global warming is even more striking for temperature trends computed over the past fifteen years (1998–2012). For this period, the observed [real, measured temps] trend of 0.05 ± 0.08 °C per decade is more than four times smaller than the average simulated [computer predicted] trend of 0.21 ± 0.03 °C per decade. The divergence between observed and CMIP5- simulated global warming begins in the early 1990s.”[11]

The UN’s AR5 report was out of date even before it hit the newsstands. AR5 claims a consensus higher than “95% certainty” that human-caused CO2 emissions are predominantly driving global warming, but critics and even many scientists are now asking, “based on what evidence?” The assumptions the scientific “consensus” was supposedly built on are crumbling in the face of new evidence.

Confidence in the latest UN projections and journalistic fawning over them has not been enhanced by another new report in Nature suggesting the IPCC scientists are using statistical research techniques more than ten years out of date:

“Because the climate system is so complex, involving nonlinear coupling of the atmosphere and ocean, there will always be uncertainties in assessments and projections of climate change. This makes it hard to predict how the intensity of tropical cyclones will change as the climate warms, the rate of sea-level rise over the next century or the prevalence and severity of future droughts and floods, to give just a few well-known examples. Indeed, much of the disagreement about the policy implications of climate change revolves around a lack of certainty. The forthcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) and the US National Climate Assessment Report will not adequately address this issue. Worse still, prevailing techniques for quantifying the uncertainties that are inherent in observed climate trends and projections of climate change are out of date by well over a decade. Modern statistical methods and models could improve this situation dramatically.”[12]

I find it deeply ironic and more than a little worrying that climate Chicken Littles like the Green Party have strayed so far from the path of truth on climate that sceptics are actually having to quote a flawed UN IPCC report at people like yourself in order to inject some reality back into all the breathless misinformation the Greens are feeding the news media with.

In summary, if the factual arguments you make to support your climate policy are so full of inaccuracies and exaggerations and bad science, what faith can New Zealanders have in the Green Party overall?

I’ve laid out a summary of my evidence. Where’s yours?